The Justice Department will seek to remedy the ills of segregated
schools by providing minority students with "an education of comparable
quality," rather than a desegregated school environment, according to a
Reagan Administration official.

Assistant Attorney General William Bradford Reynolds, who heads the
department's civil-rights division, said the Administration would "seek
a desegregation remedy that does not depend on court-ordered
busing."

In an interview with The Los Angeles Times last week, Mr. Reynolds
also said that the Administration would bring lawsuits against school
boards not on the basis of "separateness"--the charge on which most
desegregation lawsuits are based--but on the grounds that school
officials intentionally provide minority students with an inferior
education.

"Uneven treatment at the educational level suggests a different kind
of constitutional violation than the one dealing with separateness," he
told The Washington Post in a subsequent interview.

He added, however, that the new charges would be based, as most
desegregation lawsuits are, on the equal-protection clause of the 14th
Amendment.

The department is investigating "several situations" of this type,
and the first lawsuit may be filed in several weeks, he said. He did
not identify the school systems involved.

He also said that lawsuits filed on this basis would be the result
of complaints to the Justice Department.

Most of the school-desegregation lawsuits filed in federal courts in
the past 10 years--since the U.S. Supreme Court first sanctioned
mandatory busing in the 1971 Charlotte, N.C., case--have resulted from
such complaints.

A spokesman for the civil-rights division of the Justice Department
said Mr. Reynolds was not available for comment. The spokesman, John V.
Wilson, added that the Administration might incorporate a change of
position into the briefs it has filed at the appellate level in
existing lawsuits.

Mr. Wilson said the emphasis, however, would be on new lawsuits:
"We've never before filed a suit solely to address inferior education
and facilities in black schools."

Justice Department attorneys, who asked not to be identified, said
they were not aware of any school systems the department planned to sue
under the new charges.

Mr. Reynolds's remarks prompted speculation among educators about
the meaning of the new position.

"It sure sounds to me like he's talking about 'separate but
equal','' said an official of a large school district in the Southeast
who asked that he not be named because his system is involved in a
desegregation suit.

The "separate but equal" phrase refers to a position taken by the
U.S. Supreme Court in the 1896 case, Plessy v. Ferguson. In its ruling,
the Court upheld state laws that prohibited black and white students
from attending the same schools.

That ruling was nullified by the landmark 1954 Court decision, Brown
v. Board of Education, which found such laws unconstitutional.

Underpinning the decision, which paved the way for the integration
of the public schools, was the assumption that white school boards and
legislatures would never spend enough money on black schools to provide
students with an adequate education.

As desegregation law has developed, the plaintiffs have not needed
to prove that minority schools were inferior or that school boards
discriminated against them in expending resources. Proof of official
intent to segregate through gerrymandered boundaries and other
mechanisms has been sufficient to obtain busing orders in many
communities.

The approach suggested by Mr. Reynolds is novel in that it would
hinge on the educational results of official neglect, not on racial
segregation itself. And unlike desegregation law, Mr. Reynolds'
approach would make no distinction between de jure segregation--that
caused by official action--and de facto segregation caused by housing
patterns.

Many civil-rights activists, however, including the leaders of the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp),
consider "enhancement of minority schools" no substitute for
desegregation.

The Justice Department recently approved an out-of-court settlement
in a Chicago desegregation lawsuit that gives the school system until
1983 to attempt desegregation entirely through voluntary student
transfers. It would leave intact about 250 all-minority schools, for
which Chicago would be required to provide funds for supplemental
services.

One naacp lawyer has attacked the Chicago plan as "keeping black
kids in their place but giving them a few crumbs. That's nothing more
than the old doctrine of 'separate but equal'."

Mr. Reynolds referred to the Chicago desegregation plan in a speech
there on Sept. 27. He said that although "there are schools in the
system that will remain racially identifiable under the desegregation
plan...the board has undertaken compensatory programs to enhance the
quality of education provided in those schools in order to guarantee
equal educational opportunity to all students in the system.
"Experience teaches us that blacks in a segregated school environment
more often than not receive inferior educational attention," he said in
the same address. Nevertheless, he said the Administration is
"concerned, quite frankly, much less with student relocation than we
are with student education."

In announcing the new Administration position, Mr. Reynolds made no
allusion to the massive seven-year study of school desegregation
conducted for the federal government by a team of researchers headed by
Willis D. Hawley of Vanderbilt University. That study, made public last
month, identified effective strategies for school desegregation and
concluded that if the proper steps are taken, desegregation can improve
both race relations and academic performance. (See Education Week,
Sept. 21.)

Mr. Hawley, dean of the university's George Peabody College for
Teachers and head of the 16-member research group that compiled the
nine-volume study, said recently that "we ought to encourage the
development of effective minority schools. Minority schools are likely
to be part of our future. But to say you can have effective segregated
schools is not to say they are more effective than effective
desegregated schools."

Most educators and public officials, he said, "tend to measure
effectiveness narrowly, by test scores in reading and math. That's only
part of education in our society. There is some evidence that minority
children who attend desegregated schools go on to desegregated higher
education, non-traditional jobs, and the professions more often that
children who attend segregated schools. There is evidence," he
continued, "that attending desegregated schools builds the confidence,
networks, and self-esteem that allow minorities to compete."

Web Only

Notice: We recently upgraded our comments. (Learn more here.) If you are logged in as a subscriber or registered user and already have a Display Name on edweek.org, you can post comments. If you do not already have a Display Name, please create one here.

Ground Rules for Posting
We encourage lively debate, but please be respectful of others. Profanity and personal attacks are prohibited. By commenting, you are agreeing to abide by our user agreement.
All comments are public.